Thanks to his fairy tales and stories, Hans Christian Andersen,
1805-75, is probably the most widely read author in the world today, but even in
his own time he was read and known from Russia in the east to America in the west.
His career from the lowest stratum of society in his native town of Odense in Funen
via his problematic adaptation to the official and bourgeois circles in Copenhagen... More

Arguably Mark Twain's greatest fiction was "Mark Twain." Several
of the characters in his novels -- Colonel Sellers, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn -- achieved
a status beyond their mere textual existence, but in his time and since, the image
of "Mark Twain" himself is one of the best-known reference points in America's cultural
imagination... More

The most noted of all fable authors is Aesop. Most believe he lived
around the time of 620 B.C. Many fables have been attributed to Aesop, but we are
uncertain how many he actually authored. Some scholars have questioned his existence
entirely... More

It was late when Counsellor Knapp, lost in thought about the times of King Hans,
desired to return home; and fate so ordered it that he put on the goloshes of Fortune
instead of his own, and walked out into the East Street. Through the magic power
of the goloshes, he was at once carried back three hundred years, to the times of
King Hans, for which he had been longing when he put them on. Therefore he immediately
set his foot into the mud and mire of the street, which in those days possessed
no pavement. ...More

“I must tell you,” said she, “that to-day is my birthday; and
in honor of it I have been intrusted with a pair of goloshes, to introduce amongst
mankind. These goloshes have the property of making every one who puts them on imagine
himself in any place he wishes, or that he exists at any period. Every wish is fulfilled
at the moment it is expressed, so that for once mankind have the chance of being
happy.” ...More